Twitter and Compete, a marketing services company, conducted a survey to investi

Question

Twitter and Compete, a marketing services company, conducted a survey to investigate it was found that Twitter users who retweet are (reposting someone else's tweet). Among other findings, it was found that Twitter users who retweet are demographically similar to those who don't, use Twitter more often during the day, and are more likely to use Twitter on a mobile phone. Here is the methodology section contained with the survey results: The findings are based on data from surveys fielded in the United States during 2012. Twitter and Compete worked together to build a questionnaire that asked respondents about their propensity to use Twitter and other services as well as the when, where, how and why of their usage patterns. Compete interviewed 655 Internet users in the U.S. for this study. (a) Explain in simple language why it is important to know how the sample was selected when drawing conclusions about a survey. (b) Do you feel that the methodology section adequately explains how this sample was selected? If not, vhat information is lacking and why is it important?

Explanation / Answer

A sample design is a definite plan for obtaining a sample from a given population. It refers to the technique or the procedure the researcher would adopt in selecting items for the sample. Here we are interested in estimating the proportion of persons with some characteristics in the population.

It is much important to know how the sample was selected because sample is the part of the popualtion which represents the whole population infact it is the reppresentative of the population, which should possess the characteristics of the population. Therefore a surveyer selects the method of random sampling. Again which type of random sampling should be applied is depending on the characteristics of the population , whether it is heterogeneous or homogeneous. For heterogeneous population we follow stratified random sampling where we divide the population into the groups which are homogeneous within themselves .A gain we follow simple random sampling without replacement from each stratum.

Methodology section does not adequately explain how the sample was selected. Just it is given that they prepared a questionnaire to ask the respondents when ,where, how & why they used twitter.655 is their sample size(actually no. of respondents). I should be proportional to the population size. But population size has not mentioned here. In a sample survey it may happen that there may be nonrespondents also which should not be large in number as compared to the no. of respondents.

We can assume that internet users is their population . But our interest is the twitter users reposters . But all internet users users do not use twitter. Therefore sampling technique plays an important role here which is not mentioned.

Related Questions

Navigate

• Browse (All)
• Browse T
• Subjects

---

---

Integrity-first tutoring: explanations and feedback only — we do not complete graded work. Learn more.